News in Brief.

Apologies as usual for the lack of recent words here. By my own shambling, lethargic standards, this past week or so has been pretty busy, and yesterday in particular was a strange and somewhat frantic day, with news of celebrity deaths coming at rate of knots, as I found myself seeing through an evening of no money, no food and much free beer.

So, in the absence of any proper writing, here’s a… bunch of stuff:


1. Sky Saxon died yesterday.

Mysterious to the end, his age was unknown and the ailment that killed him remains unidentified. To wax lyrical re: the extent to which The Seeds ruled and the almost subliminal influence they wielded over the direction of both mainstream and underground rock from the late ‘60s onward would seem somewhat redundant, assuming I’m speaking to an audience who’ve ever taken an interest in good, weird rock n’ roll. I guess I’ve always envisioned Sky Saxon in his prime almost as a cartoon character, the ultimate fusion of punk and hippie, marauding down “The Strip” swinging his love-beads, ranting slurred diatribes against The Man before heading to Pandora’s Box to blow some wretched losers like The Doors off the fucking stage with a set of pre-Monks, pre-Fall grinding, semi-improvised visionary mayhem.

Everybody knows “Pushin’ Too Hard” and “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine” of course – indeed, the latter would definitely be my tune of choice should I ever stumble upon some mythical garage-punk karaoke bar of my dreams… not that I’d have much of a chance of replicating those incredible, lovelorn “Aaaa-AAAAWWWWwwwwww!”s; simply one of the most genius vocal performances of all time. But The Seeds were also one of the only Nuggets bands who successfully managed to channel their initial energy into making great albums too – “The Seeds”, “A Web of Sound” and “The Future” are all totally wonderful, nutzoid LPs that demand a place in anyone’s collection.

Saxon’s resurgence in the past few decades is a bit more problematic for me, given his ongoing association with The Source cult, but he still managed to play his barmy, mysterioso awesome dude role to perfection. I mean, this is the guy who, when somebody in the early/mid-sixties presumably asked him to come up with a new stage name, immediately blurted out “SKY SAXON”, for no apparent reason. What a hero. R.I.P.

Good obit by Nels Cline, via Arthur, here.




2. The Gories are back!

Well, I mean I knew they were back since they dropped the news about that joint, one-off European tour with The Oblivians last year, but still. Man, The Gories! As you’ll recall, I got so over-excited listening to The Gories a couple of years back, I even drew a picture of them.

There’s an absolutely terrific feature on the history of the band over at the Detroit Metro Times – a great example of the kind of straightforward, well-constructed overview I’d love to be able to read about more of my favourite bands of the 80s/90s/00s. (Thanks to Jessica Hopper’s blog for the link.)

There’s a lot more to The Gories than the ‘garage revivalist’ tag they’re often stuck with, so if that descriptor has ever put you off taking an interest, I’d recommend firing up yr last.fms or spotifys or whatever it is you kids have these days and taking a listen to their debut album ‘Houserockin’ – the sound of three untrained bozos in a shed making what’s pretty much a working definition of The Best Music Ever.

Here’s what happened the last time they quit the stage:




3. Veronica Falls

Veronica Falls – an ensemble previously known as The Draculas, before that Sexy Kids and once a faction of Glasgow’s The Royal We – headlined last night, and verily did they blow me away. With their dense Velvets strummage, minimal floor-tom/snare pounding, dreamy girl/boy harmonies, killer tunes, Flying Nun-esque understement and eerie graveyard atmospherics, it’s hard to imagine a band who could tap more perfectly into my current tastes. And that’s BEFORE they played a swoonsome cover of Roky Erickson’s ‘Starry Eyes’, casually breaking the Michael Jackson news to the thirty or so onlookers in the process. They were really something: go listen and befriend.


4. Sonic Youth Raid my Dreams

News at eleven: the new Sonic Youth video is like some kind of dream I’d probably have.

In fact, scratch ‘probably’, I think its entire stock of imagery is ripped straight from my nocturnal mind circa 2003-2004, thus rendering it unintentionally haunting viewing, for me at least.

It’s a great video, although I fear the band missed a trick by rather snootily portraying themselves as vague ‘overseers’ of the radical girls’ scheme, rather than placing themselves (with a wink & a nod) amongst the yuppie-cognoscenti victims.

It’s sad too that the song pretty much goes in one ear and out the other. Oh, hey, it’s another short, punky Kim one. I’ll file it with the rest.

Labels: deathblog, internet round-ups, lameness, Sonic Youth, The Gories, The Seeds, Veronica Falls, videos

A Cavalcade of Wonders.

I haven’t had much writing-time this week I’m afraid (I’ve been busy in work, doing music at home, etc.), but thankfully, the internet keeps offering up wonders, like an unstoppable tide of reasons to go on living through the working week, so here’s a round-up of some stuff you should get down with if you’ve got a spare half hour.


1. “That’s no scarecrow, it’s a crucifix in a hat!”; declaring something “the most inexplicable comic book ever published” is inherently foolhardy given the bottomless barrel of strangeness that comprises the history of funny books, so I won’t say it. But, after reading this brief piece Steve Aylett wrote for Arthur, it’s safe to say that we have a contender. Jeff Lint is clearly set to become a new guru in my life, and I shall be seeking out copies of ‘The Caterer’ by any means necessary:

“Several dissertations have been published deconstructing the long, complicated rant in issue 6 about how goats have the skeletal system of chickens (the most incisive being 'That's no scarecrow, it's a crucifix in a hat! True Phantoms in The Caterer' by Alaine Carraze). The tirade, conducted over five dense pages after Marsden interrupts a school swim meet, has been interpreted as everything from a critique of Jimmy Carter's then-undisclosed connection to the Trilateral Commission, to a warning about genetic tampering, to homosexual panic (which would jibe with the mustache attacks). Certainly the Caterer's friends are bewildered (or understanding) enough to stand listening to this drivel. But when he tries to leave by riding on an unwilling dog, the cops arrive on the scene and Marsden goes into one of his frenzies. All credit is due to Pearl Comics for depicting the relatively static scene of the diatribe on the cover, rather than the explosive gun battle that follows.”

2.“Earn your prejudices, son!”; Characteristically thought-provoking stuff from Destination:Out, as they consider the legacy of much derided jazz reactionary Wynton Marsalis. It’s interesting to see his work being given a fair shake of the whip from a pro-free/avant perspective alongside discussion of his frankly absurd views on music, and mp3s of some of the cracking stuff he was missing out on during the ‘80s speak for themselves.


3. Chris Summerlin has a new weblog – which is good news! And on this weblog, he has posted a link to an extensive collection of photos from the Library of Congress. Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have expected the Library of Congress to be a fairly fusty institution that would limit access to their archives to serious researchers, get needlessly uptight about copyrights and so forth, but no! It seems the Library of Congress have started a Flickr account, just like you or I might do, on which they say friendly things like “Yes, we really are THE Library of Congress”, and “We invited your tags and comments and you responded, wow, did you respond!”. Thus far, they’ve uploaded literally thousands of historical photographs from their archives, grouped under such headings as “World War I panoramas” and “The 1930s-40s in Colour”, for anyone in the world to freely gaze upon / share / download. Library of Congress – you’re alright!


4. Excitable, science-illiterate types such as myself tend to throw around terms such as ‘cosmic’ and ‘mind-blowing’ at the drop of a hat, so it’s good sometimes to catch up on some TRULY mind-blowing goings on, courtesy of New Scientist (I copped the link from Doc40);

“For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

Readers, will you join me in clutching your heads as if in pain and exclaiming “whoa, hold on a minute – the WHAT?”...?


5. The notion of CHOOGLIN’ has long been close to my heart. I have however tended to consider a purely musical definition of the choogle, whilst aware on some level that any attempt at a wider, verbal clarification of the concept would do the unthinkable, and halt the choogle. If you have to ask, you’ll never know. Thanks therefore are due to Ami Tallman for her/his(?) wide-ranging and visionary exploration of chooglin’ in it’s wider context on the WFMU blog:

“But don't forget, the performer who's brought the word into existence is demanding that you, his listener, choogle. This strongly suggests that the choogle is not merely something to be executed musically, but something a mere man might do, and in fact, as Fogerty himself revealed first in "Born on the Bayou," a train can do it. To choogle is always, in addition to whatever else it might entail: to go, to drive, to progress, to continue, to persist, to keep on the move, to remain in motion.

The thing I love best about the choogle is its fundamental logical impossibility: for while it is en-choogle, it is definitionally unstoppable. But it will stop, though until the moment it does, it will have been impossible that it should. Yet this is perfectly suitable, for the ambition which set the choogle in motion to begin with was also impossible, for it is an ambition whose attainment can only be reached through the accomplishment of something the choogler couldn't even have imagined -- still can't, in fact, even at the moment of impact with success. The choogler who choogles to the absolute must rely entirely on his or her senses to even perceive the accomplishment, for absent from the choogler's mind is any abstract frame of reference with which to fill in those aspects of the experience that might have been taken for granted.”

6. Teleport City has long been one of my favourite places on the internet, home to a vast and ever-growing archive of lengthy, fascinating, idiosyncratic and consistently hilarious write-ups of all manner of trash/pulp/cult/weird/whatever cinema, their essential philosophy being summed up quite well I feel by this extract from a review of The Land That Time Forgot:

“Most children view films differently than adults. When a film is cheap and boring, the cheapness doesn’t really register (what do you have, at age six or seven, to even judge cheapness by) and the boring parts wash over you like water off a duck’s back. You tune out when it gets boring, and all you remember afterward are the cool parts. Thus, even really crummy movies can seem relatively enjoyable, because you don’t remember the dull bits; all you remember is the shrieking caveman being torn apart by a pterodactyl. Oh sure, I know some of you watched these movies with the keen eye of a wizened critic even at age six, and you turned your nose up at how juvenile they were even when you were juvenile. Well, I hope you had fun watching Kramer versus Kramer as a child, while the rest of us were watching dinosaurs fighting a submarine while Doug McClure punched cavemen in the face.”

My reason for bringing Teleport City to your attention now however is their current series on the murky world of Indian horror, which, even by the high standards of this site, is an absolute joy for all lovers of… this sort of thing. See Shaitani Dracula and Pyassa Shaitan, and go from there. Be warned though: if you’re internetting from work, you may soon find yourself without a job once you get stuck into Teleport City, probably rejoicing at all the free time your newfound destitution will give you to keep on reading about post-apocalyptic rollerskating nun movies. There but for the grace of god...


7. Last but not least: only halfway through January, and already some great new bands are skimming my radar, so say a big three chord YES PLEASE to The Rayographs and The Strange Boys, just for starters.

Labels: chooglin', comics, film, internet round-ups, jazz, photos, weirdness